This post is almost entirely factually incorrect, but to go point-by-point
1. For the parties I throw—I assume the person is referring to some of the parties in 2017, as those were the ones that had “a lot of sex”? I agree consent wasn’t very clearly set out, but I’m not sure I regret this. I’ve never had anybody express to me the concerns laid out in the post, this is the first time I’m becoming aware events I’ve thrown have had a negative impact on people. I do genuinely not want this to happen and am now thinking about what and how to change about my events in the future. But I haven’t thrown events with sex in them for years, so I’m guessing I need to be more careful if I decide to do this again? Happy to have feedback from people who’ve attended my events, here.
2. I’ve never played drug roulette or seen drug roulette played at one of my parties, this is a blatantly incorrect claim. I have joked about playing it numerous times, though; maybe someone heard me joking and misunderstood it as me saying I’d done it before? (edit: to be slightly more clear, I have speculated out loud about the specifics of how we could do this if we wanted to, for fun, but I’ve never claimed that I had actually done it before or made any actual plans for doing it)
3. “you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone.”—also blatantly incorrect? Absolutely incorrect if it applies to drug roulette, cause I’ve never done it, but I also have never said this about any other activity to my recollection.
4. “Also, there is reason to believe that one of the things Aella enjoys doing is consensual non-consent torture, designed to break people.” This is mostly true, but misleading! I’d just say “consensual torture”—there’s no façade of nonconsent like you’d see in kink play. I just straightforwardly tie people up and hurt them, after very clearly explaining everything, and they’re able to stop any time. Usually it lasts around 20-30 minutes, and I’ve never done it twice on one person. I’ve also had it done to me! It’s mostly just a really interesting experience to be in a lot of pain and see what your mind does, and to meditate on the experience of coping with that intensity. The purpose is definitely not to ‘break’ people. I’m more than happy for all the people I’ve done this with to talk about their experiences. I’ve also been very upfront about doing this with everybody.
5. The mention of attempting to cancel Joscha Bach was not an attempt to cancel, it was more talking about gut feelings, and fails to mention that I made a followup post about this saying “I officially retract my very public yelling about bad JUJU, say while i do have strong bad juju it seems like this isnt really matching onto other people’s experiences, and im considering it to be a false positive, and i want to make this public and say you should downgrade the extent to which you consider my juju guiding in this example and possibly others” (sorry Joscha I didn’t mean for you to see this, everybody said very nice things about you and I updated in that direction)
6. Idk if I’ve tried to “cancel” MAPLE/OAK? You can read the facebook posts in question here https://www.facebook.com/caroline.f.hubert/posts/10222751244317191 and decide for yourself if this seems like a ‘cancellation’ attempt. This had nothing to do with the director stepping down, I wasn’t aware that happened.
7. Trying to cancel Leverage? Probably the closest to the truth. I do think Leverage seemed to get pretty bad by the end and people should take that very seriously.
8. No, I was not mittenscautious. I did not gather the stories, set up the inbox, I did not make the medium account. The most I did was be the first one to share the post on my facebook page. I was roommates with Persephone at the time.
9. “My intuitive read of this sequence of events, at the time as well as now, was: 1. Brent did something bad. 2. CFAR initiated an investigative process to determine what was to be done. That process reached a certain result. 3. Aella contested that result, and initiated an investigative process of dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence. 4. Due to the strength of Aella’s frame, CFAR capitulated and ceded de facto control of the community to her.”
Also untrue. I’d just moved to the bay at the time and barely knew anyone. I think the only substantial commentary I provided here was some comments on a facebook thread (edit: Duncan linked it here, you can find my comments by ctrl-f “Ok I am late to the party”) where there were hundreds of other comments. I would be absolutely shocked if I had any impact whatsoever on CFAR making any decision. I doubt they even knew who I was. I think I probably was more against Brent’s cancellation than the median here (edit: I was still for it, just the majority were ‘very’ for it; I was more tempered with the intensity of the boot); the author of this article and I had a conversation at the time where he asked me to donate money to Brent as iirc he had already done, and I seriously considered it (edit: but decided against, after talking to some people who knew Brent). Unfortunately I think the author blocked me on FB (or deleted it) so I can’t find those messages.
10. ““Why is she doing this? This is undermining my frame. I’m trying to do something and she’s fucking it up.”” I’m pretty sure I didn’t say this, I think I said something more like the Lesswrong comments I made on the post itself, which you can read.
“She said: “yeah, I don’t really mind being the evil thing. Seems okay to me.”” I wouldn’t say this to most other people, because there’s an association with ‘being evil’ that I don’t mean, and I don’t want them to assume. This association is the thing implied here when taken out of context. I assumed the author understood, but now I suspect there was a misunderstanding. The thing I actually meant you can read in my blog post here, ctrl-f “evil”
11. “And that’s all I have for you. I don’t know how else to end; if this were a cancellation, it might include a bit of “frame control” to try to tell you how to receive all of this and what to do about it. (The end of “Brent: A Warning””
I think he might be implying that I’m doing frame control in that article, except I didn’t write the end of that article. edit: to clarify here in case it was unclear, I do support the banning of Brent from the community, given the level of harm I believe he did to young women. Also, this seems like a misunderstanding of what I meant by ‘frame control’, which might be my fault for being unclear.
Anyway; I’m not sure exactly why this post was written? If I have actually caused damage to people I do want to know, and if anyone feels comfortable telling me they were hurt by me I would value that information. But most of the claims here are concretely wrong, and I’m left mostly confused about what’s going on and why.
If the party in question happened in 2017 or later, I was probably also there. (Aella and I lived together for much but not all of 2017–2021, and I attended maybe 90% of the parties she threw in that time. We also used to date, but we broke up and don’t live together anymore.) It’s hard to pin down because I can’t think of a party that fits the description exactly. This is also the first that I’m aware of someone having a negative experience at the parties I’m thinking of, although I can understand how someone who had such an experience wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to the hosts about it. It’s hard to say more without knowing more, except maybe worth mentioning that some of the candidate parties I’m thinking of were not primarily organized by Aella (although she may have been there & helped out). I’m also interested in feedback about parties I’ve been a part of and genuinely do not want people to have experiences like the one described.
and 3. I’ve spent most of the last four years with/near Aella and have never heard of “drug roulette” happening. I also can’t imagine her telling people not to talk about it with anyone. Both those things seem deeply incongruous with my understanding of how Aella would behave toward people. Also for whatever it’s worth I’ve never even heard the word rohypnol before, and to my knowledge neither I nor Aella nor anyone I’ve lived with has had or allowed “roofies” in our home or to our parties.
Regarding the torture stuff — Aella “consensually tortured” me in 2018, and it was a positive experience for me. I felt cared for, and in fact Aella ended the session of her own accord because she wanted to make sure I was ok. I also know of two other people whom Aella “consensually tortured” who had a positive experiences, and I don’t know of anyone who had a negative experience. Also I think Aella has only done the “torture” thing a handful of times (5–6ish?) total. (I’ll also add a tiny correction and say that Aella has done it twice on a person—that person being me—but the second time was brief and if she either forgot about that or isn’t counting it, that seems fine.)
Can vouch for everything Aella says about the Joscha Bach stuff.
I posted it to Facebook first. I was friends/roommates with Persephone, discussed the post beforehand, and offered (or she asked, maybe?) to post it publicly there to get readership so she could also preserve her anonymity. This was scary for me at the time, as afaik I’d seen no negative discussion about Brent like that, and I was new to the community and didn’t know the temperature/how people would react. Walking into a new community and being the conduit for a bomb dropping on one of its members is not a comfortable experience. I don’t regret it though!
But I never had access to the mittenscautious accounts, and I never had contact with the other poster who had their accounts published. My participation organizing anything was limited almost entirely to making the initial facebook link post.
If you scroll up I summarize it in a tweet just a bit above here
This post is almost entirely factually incorrect, but to go point-by-point
1. For the parties I throw—I assume the person is referring to some of the parties in 2017, as those were the ones that had “a lot of sex”? I agree consent wasn’t very clearly set out, but I’m not sure I regret this. I’ve never had anybody express to me the concerns laid out in the post, this is the first time I’m becoming aware events I’ve thrown have had a negative impact on people. I do genuinely not want this to happen and am now thinking about what and how to change about my events in the future. But I haven’t thrown events with sex in them for years, so I’m guessing I need to be more careful if I decide to do this again? Happy to have feedback from people who’ve attended my events, here.
2. I’ve never played drug roulette or seen drug roulette played at one of my parties, this is a blatantly incorrect claim. I have joked about playing it numerous times, though; maybe someone heard me joking and misunderstood it as me saying I’d done it before? (edit: to be slightly more clear, I have speculated out loud about the specifics of how we could do this if we wanted to, for fun, but I’ve never claimed that I had actually done it before or made any actual plans for doing it)
3. “you are never allowed to talk about it with anyone.”—also blatantly incorrect? Absolutely incorrect if it applies to drug roulette, cause I’ve never done it, but I also have never said this about any other activity to my recollection.
4. “Also, there is reason to believe that one of the things Aella enjoys doing is consensual non-consent torture, designed to break people.” This is mostly true, but misleading! I’d just say “consensual torture”—there’s no façade of nonconsent like you’d see in kink play. I just straightforwardly tie people up and hurt them, after very clearly explaining everything, and they’re able to stop any time. Usually it lasts around 20-30 minutes, and I’ve never done it twice on one person. I’ve also had it done to me! It’s mostly just a really interesting experience to be in a lot of pain and see what your mind does, and to meditate on the experience of coping with that intensity. The purpose is definitely not to ‘break’ people. I’m more than happy for all the people I’ve done this with to talk about their experiences. I’ve also been very upfront about doing this with everybody.
5. The mention of attempting to cancel Joscha Bach was not an attempt to cancel, it was more talking about gut feelings, and fails to mention that I made a followup post about this saying “I officially retract my very public yelling about bad JUJU, say while i do have strong bad juju it seems like this isnt really matching onto other people’s experiences, and im considering it to be a false positive, and i want to make this public and say you should downgrade the extent to which you consider my juju guiding in this example and possibly others”
(sorry Joscha I didn’t mean for you to see this, everybody said very nice things about you and I updated in that direction)
6. Idk if I’ve tried to “cancel” MAPLE/OAK? You can read the facebook posts in question here https://www.facebook.com/caroline.f.hubert/posts/10222751244317191 and decide for yourself if this seems like a ‘cancellation’ attempt. This had nothing to do with the director stepping down, I wasn’t aware that happened.
7. Trying to cancel Leverage? Probably the closest to the truth. I do think Leverage seemed to get pretty bad by the end and people should take that very seriously.
8. No, I was not mittenscautious. I did not gather the stories, set up the inbox, I did not make the medium account. The most I did was be the first one to share the post on my facebook page. I was roommates with Persephone at the time.
9. “My intuitive read of this sequence of events, at the time as well as now, was: 1. Brent did something bad. 2. CFAR initiated an investigative process to determine what was to be done. That process reached a certain result. 3. Aella contested that result, and initiated an investigative process of dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence. 4. Due to the strength of Aella’s frame, CFAR capitulated and ceded de facto control of the community to her.”
Also untrue. I’d just moved to the bay at the time and barely knew anyone. I think the only substantial commentary I provided here was some comments on a facebook thread (edit: Duncan linked it here, you can find my comments by ctrl-f “Ok I am late to the party”) where there were hundreds of other comments. I would be absolutely shocked if I had any impact whatsoever on CFAR making any decision. I doubt they even knew who I was. I think I probably was more against Brent’s cancellation than the median here (edit: I was still for it, just the majority were ‘very’ for it; I was more tempered with the intensity of the boot); the author of this article and I had a conversation at the time where he asked me to donate money to Brent as iirc he had already done, and I seriously considered it (edit: but decided against, after talking to some people who knew Brent). Unfortunately I think the author blocked me on FB (or deleted it) so I can’t find those messages.
10. ““Why is she doing this? This is undermining my frame. I’m trying to do something and she’s fucking it up.””
I’m pretty sure I didn’t say this, I think I said something more like the Lesswrong comments I made on the post itself, which you can read.
“She said: “yeah, I don’t really mind being the evil thing. Seems okay to me.””
I wouldn’t say this to most other people, because there’s an association with ‘being evil’ that I don’t mean, and I don’t want them to assume. This association is the thing implied here when taken out of context. I assumed the author understood, but now I suspect there was a misunderstanding.
The thing I actually meant you can read in my blog post here, ctrl-f “evil”
11. “And that’s all I have for you. I don’t know how else to end; if this were a cancellation, it might include a bit of “frame control” to try to tell you how to receive all of this and what to do about it. (The end of “Brent: A Warning””
I think he might be implying that I’m doing frame control in that article, except I didn’t write the end of that article. edit: to clarify here in case it was unclear, I do support the banning of Brent from the community, given the level of harm I believe he did to young women. Also, this seems like a misunderstanding of what I meant by ‘frame control’, which might be my fault for being unclear.
Anyway; I’m not sure exactly why this post was written? If I have actually caused damage to people I do want to know, and if anyone feels comfortable telling me they were hurt by me I would value that information. But most of the claims here are concretely wrong, and I’m left mostly confused about what’s going on and why.
If the party in question happened in 2017 or later, I was probably also there. (Aella and I lived together for much but not all of 2017–2021, and I attended maybe 90% of the parties she threw in that time. We also used to date, but we broke up and don’t live together anymore.) It’s hard to pin down because I can’t think of a party that fits the description exactly. This is also the first that I’m aware of someone having a negative experience at the parties I’m thinking of, although I can understand how someone who had such an experience wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to the hosts about it. It’s hard to say more without knowing more, except maybe worth mentioning that some of the candidate parties I’m thinking of were not primarily organized by Aella (although she may have been there & helped out). I’m also interested in feedback about parties I’ve been a part of and genuinely do not want people to have experiences like the one described.
and 3. I’ve spent most of the last four years with/near Aella and have never heard of “drug roulette” happening. I also can’t imagine her telling people not to talk about it with anyone. Both those things seem deeply incongruous with my understanding of how Aella would behave toward people. Also for whatever it’s worth I’ve never even heard the word rohypnol before, and to my knowledge neither I nor Aella nor anyone I’ve lived with has had or allowed “roofies” in our home or to our parties.
Regarding the torture stuff — Aella “consensually tortured” me in 2018, and it was a positive experience for me. I felt cared for, and in fact Aella ended the session of her own accord because she wanted to make sure I was ok. I also know of two other people whom Aella “consensually tortured” who had a positive experiences, and I don’t know of anyone who had a negative experience. Also I think Aella has only done the “torture” thing a handful of times (5–6ish?) total. (I’ll also add a tiny correction and say that Aella has done it twice on a person—that person being me—but the second time was brief and if she either forgot about that or isn’t counting it, that seems fine.)
Can vouch for everything Aella says about the Joscha Bach stuff.
Can confirm that Aella is not mittenscautious.
The post of mine referenced above.
Thank you. I appreciate you for addressing the points.
Elsewhere, you wrote:
If the mittenscautious Tumblr or Medium account was not run by you, in what sense was this true?
I posted it to Facebook first. I was friends/roommates with Persephone, discussed the post beforehand, and offered (or she asked, maybe?) to post it publicly there to get readership so she could also preserve her anonymity. This was scary for me at the time, as afaik I’d seen no negative discussion about Brent like that, and I was new to the community and didn’t know the temperature/how people would react. Walking into a new community and being the conduit for a bomb dropping on one of its members is not a comfortable experience. I don’t regret it though!
But I never had access to the mittenscautious accounts, and I never had contact with the other poster who had their accounts published. My participation organizing anything was limited almost entirely to making the initial facebook link post.
If you scroll up I summarize it in a tweet just a bit above here
I believe it was Aella who first published links to the Medium posts on
TwitterFacebook or other platforms, so that their existence became known.